Washington Post editor Martin Baron says media organizations should “stop looking for the moon shot”

Susan Delacourt writes:
"(Martin) Baron was at Carleton University on Wednesday night to talk about the state of journalism, a topic being much discussed in Canada these days. Spotlight, for those who haven’t seen it, is the story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative reporters unearthed the ugly truth about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
"Baron, who is now at the Washington Post, did want to assure us at the outset that he’s not as humourless as he appears in the movie. "And in fact, one of Baron’s more intriguing thoughts on the future of journalism borrowed on an old joke: Why did we put a man on the moon before we invented wheels on luggage?
"That is a funny line, but it’s also true (I checked)."

 

Full column

Global News journalist tackles saw-wielding man outside Ghomeshi courthouse

Charges including assault and making death threats have been laid after a bizarre incident outside the Jian Ghomeshi trial courthouse that police say saw a man threateningly wave a saw before being tackled to the ground by a Global News journalist.
The man was outside the Old City Hall courthouse around 7 a.m. Friday — hours before the disgraced radio star’s trial convened — when he began swearing and indicated he had a weapon, police said.

 It’s alleged the man pulled a bladeless saw from a bag, started wielding it and began talking about a gun when Global News online reporter Adam Miller, who was lining up to cover the trial, wrestled him to the ground.

More

The sad tale of the PostMedia bloodbath in The Walrus

"Why employ local publishers if their loyalties were to their community and their staff, rather than dedicated to the health of the overall company? Most were let go in the spring of 2013, replaced by 'regional' leaders.
"The instatement of corporate executives in lieu of local publishers may have rid Postmedia of irritating pushback from metro papers, but it also effectively cut ties to the communities these papers had worked to build over the years.
"When a local paper doesn’t seem local anymore—when it loses its ability to be a community partner—it loses credibility with the business community, which further impacts sales."
The whole story

Media outlets lose battle for bikini photo in Jian Ghomeshi case

Media outlets do not have the right to publish the bikini-clad photo of one of the complainants in Jian Ghomeshi's sexual assault trial, even with the woman's face blurred, the judge in the case has ruled.
A lawyer representing seven major news organizations — including the CBC — sought access to a photo that the woman sent to Ghomeshi more than a year after he allegedly assaulted her.
The photo was presented as evidence, but was not shown to spectators in the courtroom. It was described as a shot of the woman in a red bikini on a beach. (CBC)

The cause of the crisis in newspapers is not a mystery. So why investigate it?

Excellent Kelly McParland column in the NatPost. Excerpt:
"It’s simple: new technology has made the existing business model less viable. People peer at laptops, cellphones and tablets, rather than printed pages. The news business can fill those screens just as easily as it fills newsprint. It just can’t generate as much revenue. Readers and advertisers won’t pay as much for news on screens as they did for news on paper. Which makes the existing order unaffordable.
"That’s it in a nutshell. You could royal commission your way across the country from now until a week next Christmas and it would still come down to that. Despite all its efforts, the print industry hasn’t figured out how to squeeze enough money out of the screen industry to support itself. Everyone is in the same boat and struggling mightily to find an answer.
"The news business won’t go away. If anything, the proliferation of digital news sites has increased the demand for “content” to fill them. Much of the 'content' now comes from those same newspapers that fear for their existence. Nimrods who squeal with delight at the potential disappearance of print publications that displease them fail to realize it’s the legacy, mainstream media that keeps feeding all those new web sites with most of the information, ideas and issues they regurgitate.
The whole column